The idea is to help create an interest in software coding in young people so that Apple can find the next generations of software developers who will have the skills to develop apps for its iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches and other devices.
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Christened as Swift Playgrounds, the app with an interface similar to Codecademy is now said to be available for iPad.
“I wish Swift Playgrounds was around when I was first learning to code”, said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering.
Called Swift Playgrounds, the app provides its users with a simple story that involves helping a character called Byte collect gems. Anvitha Vijay’s Smartkins Animals app lets smaller children identify animals and this makes her the youngest developer to attend WWDC, which meant she got a meeting with CEO Tim Cook and special mention on stage. There’s even a feature that suggests language for code, acting as an autofill in a way.
The programming language is already used in more than 100,000 apps, and can be used for mobile games – as was demonstrated during the presentation. The coding app for kids will launch in the fall for free.
More advanced students can also use and modify Swift Playground’s built-in templates to use as a starting off point and add their own graphics, commands and interactions and export their customized code to Xcode to turn their program into their very own app.
This might be the first democratisation of coding and it is certainly the sort of thing only Apple will do.
While the app features a comprehensive library of lessons, Apple intends to release new standalone challenges over time so that students can continue to hone and develop their skills. Chinese developers have created 270,000 apps on Apple Store and the Greater China region ranks number one in the world in the number of apps downloaded.
Equally, a cynic could argue that with Swift Playground Apple is steering young people to learn it coding language, thereby potentially corner some of the star developers of the future into creating apps for its ecosystem. Developers use Swift to code the majority of iOS apps available today.
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Swift Playgrounds is now in developer preview, with the public beta launching next month.
